YouTube source for news, disaster footage: Study

A new study finds that YouTube is emerging as a major platform for news, one to which viewers increasingly turn for eyewitness videos in times of major events and natural disasters.

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism on Monday released its examination of 15 months of the most popular news videos on the Google Inc.-owned site. It found that while viewership for TV news still easily outpaces those consuming news on YouTube, the video-sharing site is a growing digital environment where professional journalism mingles with citizen content.

More than a third of the most-watched videos studied came from citizens. Though more than half of the most-watched videos came from news organizations, footage in those videos sometimes incorporated footage shot by YouTube users.